An STM32 processor powers this PC

This 32-bit computer is a project [Bogdan Marinescu] built as a contest entry. Sadly he didn’t win, but he did do an excellent job of documenting the build. Having seen several other home built PC projects we’re familiar with the challenges that go into such a thing, and he found some great solutions to each of them.

He started with an STM32F103ZET6 chip. This is an ARM Cortex-M3 processor which brings a lot of power to the playing field. That being said, generating a VGA signal would pretty much zap the usefulness of the chip for other processes so he offloaded that work on a separate Propeller chip. A microSD card serves as storage for the machine, which runs eLua (embedded Lua programming language). There is 1 MB of external RAM and a PS/2 port for keyboard interface. The system is networked thanks to an ENC28J60 Ethernet controller. Don’t miss the video after the break where you can see several demos running on the system.

A port might not be that hard. I haven’t looked at the code for this project, but It’s probably written mostly in the Lua level. That would make porting it easy once we have eLua running on the launchpad (it already runs on various LM3S chips), since the (Lua) code should be (mostly) compatible across platforms.

The same hardware (Propeller chip VGA and PROPTERM program) is used in the Mizar32 (AVR32) VGA module. I’m not sure who copied who or if it was a collaborative venture!
See simplemachines.it/mizar32
eLuaBrain should be easy to port to that platform.

PropTerm is modified to use direct memory access (sort of) on the brain, otherwise it would’ve been quite slow. As for the “who copied who”, the only thing I used is the original PropTerm firmware itself.